Zoo Animals Graze In Peace During Last Weekend's Big Pineapple Festival

With the weekend just gone playing host to The Big Pineapple Music Festival in the Sunshine Coast, featuring The Jezabels, John Butler Trio and Violent Soho, animal activist Christine Bennett has commended the festival for keeping noise pollution to a minimum, given that the festival has in the past overlooked Queensland Zoo. 

As Sunshine Coast Daily notes, Bennett gave the new location for the festival two thumbs up, saying it was "far removed" from last year's, but is adamant that precautions like this are taken for all future music festivals.

"Saturday's event was totally appropriate and reasonable, so if there were guarantees from the council that every year this was the way the festival was going to be, that would be wonderful."

Comparing this year's event to last year's, she said, "Gone were the amplified screaming vocals, squealing microphones and machine-gun staccato of last year's event. Even the heavy bass beats were not intrusive at the zoo entrance point. The result has made a huge difference for these captive animals."

This year under new organisers, the 9,000-strong festival made a point to move farther away from the Zoo, with their official website stating, "We are now roughly 1km away and on the other side of the busy highway from where the Zoo is."

The website also notes that, "As part of our strategy we will also have a sound technician with a sound meter that will be standing on the Big Pineapple/Zoo side of the Highway taking  sound readings which will allow us to keep the sound levels within the set legal parameters that music events in QLD work within."

Bennett started a petition via change.org recently, citing a need for a 5km buffer zone between rock concerts and "zoo animals and baby koalas". More than 700 people of the 1,000 needed have signed the petition.